Nvidia to offer 8 Teraflop personal supercomputer

Nvidia, known for graphics processors designed for video gaming, is expanding into the market for high-performance computing processors.

By
Robert Mullins, IDG News Service
| Jun 21, 2007

| IDG News Service

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Nvidia, known for graphics processors designed for video gaming, is expanding into the market for high-performance computing processors.

Nvidia has introduced the Tesla line of processors, which it says will make high-density parallel processing capabilities available in workstation computers.

The Tesla graphics processing unit (GPU) features 128 parallel processors and delivers up to 518 gigaflops of parallel computation. A gigaflop refers to the processing of a billion floating point operations per second. Nvidia envisions the Tesla being used in high-performance computing environments such as geosciences, molecular biology or medical diagnostics.

Nvidia will also offer Tesla in a workstation, which it calls a ‘Deskside Supercomputer’, that includes two Tesla GPUs, attaches to a PC or workstation via a PCI-Express connection, and delivers up to 8 teraflops of processing power. A teraflop is the processing of a trillion floating point operations per second.

The list price for the Tesla GPU would start at $1,499 (£750) in the US and the deskside computer at $7,500 (£3,750). Both will be available beginning in August. Qualification samples of the Computing Server, with a list price of $12,000 (£6,000), will be available in the US in September. The product will be fully available in the November-December time frame, Nvidia said.

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"Scientists will know how to use this and produce results," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, at a preview event for journalists last month at the company's headquarters in California. "They will be able to do simulations in days, not months, seconds, not minutes."

The Tesla is the third major product line from Nvidia, whose GeForce GPUs deliver high-end graphics to entertainment products such as video game players. Its Quadro processor line enables computer-aided design in the creation of digital content, including 3D graphics. It also released in February a beta version of software it calls CUDA, for compute unified device architecture, which enables software code to be written to use a computer's GPU as well as the CPU (central processing unit) for added processing power. A general availability of CUDA is expected in the second half of this year.